Nobel prize winner Jody Williams to sign memoir in Burlington

Jun. 26, 2013

Landmine ban activist and Nobel Prize Winner Jody Williams will sign copies of her book, 'My Name Is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl's Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize' at 7 p.m. Thursday at Phoenix Books in Burlington. She is shown here on the book jacket. / Ryan Mercer/Free Press

She’s traveled the world, negotiated treaties and seen her work save limbs and lives. It’s heady stuff and yet 16 years after small-town-Vermonter-turned international activist Jody Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize, she’s not the slightest bit puffed up.

She hopes her new new memoir, “My Name Is Jody Williams,” inspires everyday people to take action to solve the world’s injustices much like she took action to ban land mines.

In a telephone interview, Williams joked that her post-Nobel humility is good public relations for protesting in general. The fact that she didn’t become ‘pompous’ after the award really inspires a lot of activists, she said.

She then challenged people to stop “whining” about the world’s problems and get to work.

“If you don’t do something, you’re just wasting your energy as far as I’m concerned. You have to do something to make a difference.”

Williams will read from the memoir at 7 p.m. today at Phoenix Books in Burlington. She and her husband Steve Goose, whom she refers to affectionately as “Goose,” split their time between Virginia and their Vermont house in the town of Westminster West.

Her story has taken her to points as distant as El Salvador and Norway but Vermont has had a profound influence on Williams, as the book explains.

She spent her early years in Poultney and moved with her family to Brattleboro in grade school. She was raised by an industrious father who ran a grocery store and other small businesses, and a devout Catholic mother of Italian heritage who prayed to St. Jude during times of trouble.

Standing up to bullies

There were five children, little money and much tumult over the care of the eldest child, Steve, who was born deaf and later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

When bullies taunted Steve, Williams stood up to them and counts this as one of her first fights against injustice.

“Even as a kid, people being mean to people who either couldn’t or wouldn’t defend themselves riled me up,” Williams said. “And I started slowly defending them or speaking up for them.”

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As Steve grew, he often acted out, sometimes violently. He once tried to strangle his mother with a telephone cord, according to the memoir.

Despite the trials, Williams’ parents kept Steve at home and gave up on the idea of special schools after a disastrous experiment early on with a boarding school for the deaf. Nowadays Steve still lives with Williams’ 82-year-old mother. He is not violent and medication has helped him become more stable.

The whole family remains close and Williams counts her sisters and mother among her best friends.

“My brother is very fortunate that he is in a family that would never abandon him to the horrific circumstances that he could otherwise have been abandoned to,” she said. “It wasn’t even a question.”

In the memoir, Williams describes her shift from obedient, introverted young girl who smiled behind thick glasses at her First Communion to activist. In high school, she began to seriously question the sermons and readings at Mass and although she remains interested in theology today considers herself an atheist who practices Buddhism.

After high school, she enrolled at the University of Vermont. Her early experience was all about following the rules and rushing home on weekends to a high school boyfriend she would marry shortly after graduation and divorce a few years later.

Becoming an activist

The time at UVM exposed her to growing protest of the Vietnam War and the feminist movement. Her interest in the world grew when she took a job in the accounting department at the School for International Training in Brattleboro and soon enrolled in a master’s program to earn a certificate to teach Spanish. Her 20s continued with stints teaching, living in Mexico and then Washington, D.C., where she became active in the effort to protest U.S. involvement in El Salvador. From there, her career as an activist was launched and after a 1991 meeting with Bobby Muller, executive director of the Vietnam Veterans of America, Williams turned her attention to ending the carnage caused by landmines that stay in the ground long after conflicts are over.

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She was a founder and coordinator of The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, helping to bring global attention to the mutilation and misery the explosives cause to both soldiers and civilians.

Winning the peace prize in 1997 changed her life, mostly for the better. There was a downside, however. Initially the weight of the recognition pressed on Williams in a deeply uncomfortable way.

“Suddenly you’re expected to be a combination of Mother Teresa and the Delphi Oracle, “ she explained. “It’s ridiculous.”

When Williams was asked to give speeches, she sometimes felt she was disappointing the audience with her direct style and unpretentious manner. “I had a very hard time adjusting to what I thought they expected of me ... For quite a few years I would come home and cry.”

The pressure eased as Williams saw how the Nobel spotlight helped advance causes she cared about, starting with the campaign against land mines.

The autumn before she and the campaign were recognized with the Nobel, 90 countries were at the treaty negotiating table. By the treaty signing in Ottawa the December after the award was announced, the number had jumped to 122.

Now 161 countries are part of the treaty and mine clearance programs have helped reduce the number of mines in the ground around the world from about 20,000 to 4,000, Williams said.

“There’s been huge progress ... It really is a tribute to the work of the ban movement.”

More work to do

The United States has never signed the treaty. It has been a leading funder of mine clearance programs and no longer produces or exports land mines — changes that are partly due to political leadership on the issue from U.S. Sen. Patricky Leahy, D-Vt.

Although the U.S. has significantly helped reduce the lethal reach of land mines, Williams continues to call, in her trademark no-nonsense way, for her home nation to take the final step.

She blames U.S. “exceptionalism” for the reluctance, at least in part. The U.S. “really prefers that other countries are bound by treaties and it isn’t,” Williams said.

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In 2006 Williams helped create the Nobel Women’s Initiative to highlight the work of women around the world who are working for lasting peace. That was a sweet moment — realizing again that the Nobel helped her build the clout and public attention to launch a new campaign.

“It felt like I was actively sharing it with women around the world,” Williams said. “All of a sudden, especially, I loved having it because I could help people with it.”

Williams is also campaigning against the development of robots as killing machines in war — a subject that could be her next book — and she founded an international campaign to stop rape and gender violence in conflict.

As she recounts in her memoir, Williams was raped by a death squad leader in El Salvador in the 1980s.

“I recognize that it was an attempt to terrify me and maybe my organization into leaving the country and that didn’t work,” Williams said. “I have a very highly developed ability to disassociate emotionally because of my brother and it was quite a useful tool in that experience. But you know, it’s an act of terror, really.”

In war, soldiers rape to terrify women and destroy the fabric of community, Williams said.

The war rape culture will not be changed quickly and must be addressed on multiple levels, she said. Part of the effort is to change the focus from the woman who has been raped to the perpetrator of the rape, she said.

If the Nobel taught her anything, it’s that regular people can achieve change if they are determined.

“You can change the world and I think that’s one of the huge contributions of our campaign.”